Why Did It Take Two Brits to Make a Great Film About Slavery?

12 Years a Slave poses an uncomfortable question for American-made movies

12 Years a Slave is an American story. More than that, it is perhaps the quintessential American story — the story of its original sin. Based on the 1853 autobiography by Solomon Northup, the story is simple and terrible — a successful man with a full life and a happy family is kidnapped, kept in a plantation for twelve years, enduring unspeakable horrors, and then miraculously redeemed. In short, it is the history of African-American enslavement and liberation condensed into a contained narrative that has the added advantage of being historically verifiable in every detail. It is the kind of film that is so obviously necessary that it makes you wonder how it wasn't made before. Directed by a Brit, Steve McQueen, and starring fellow Brit Chiwetel Ejiofor as Solomon and Michael Fassbender as the plantation owner Edwin Epps, it also poses the question of why it took outsiders to make the most honest and direct film ever made on the subject of American slavery.

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2012 was a year filled with white American directors making movies about black oppression, the most notable of which were Spielberg's Lincoln and Tarantino's Django Unchained. As I wrote before, those two films took two completely different approaches to the issue. In Lincoln, slavery was a kind of intellectual error by white people, corrected by the legal remedy of the Thirteenth Amendment. In Django Unchained the concept of human property was merely a legal fiction to cover over a lurid all-consuming sadomasochism. That sadomasochism could only be corrected by a Spaghetti Western fantasy of brutal physical revenge — the redeemed couple ride out into their happy ending with the plantation burning behind them.

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12 Years a Slave, out this weekend and likely to be a major contender at next year's Oscars, is a fusion of these two visions — the legalistic and the lurid. The characters are based on real people, and their reality is captured in detailed recreations based on a historical manuscript. The white people are absolutely terrifying in this movie, but they are by no means cartoonish villains. Fassbender's Epps is one of the nastiest slavemasters ever put on screen, but others are equally scary though they aren't as psychopathic. Paul Giamatti plays a slave dealer in New Orleans. The way that he scrubs down the slaves, rubs their asses and backs as if he were a horsedealer who loved horseflesh, is nauseating. His primary emotion when a mother has a hysterical breakdown while having her children taken from her, during a trade, is irritation at furniture suddenly acting like human beings. Benedict Cumberbatch, as the "good owner," is even worse in his way than the dealer. He knows that Solomon is a person; he knows that he has been kidnapped; and yet he keeps him. 12 Years a Slave shows that there were a lot of people between the heroes and the monsters that slavery and its ending created. They all lived in evil.

More even than these compelling portraits of slaves and slaveowners, 12 Years a Slave provides a detailed account of just how it all worked. I have children and one of the interesting things about telling your children about the horrors of history is how deeply they care about the physical details. They don't care about "economic systems" or "racist conceptions." How close to the wall were the slaves chained? Did they have to work every day? For how long? How much were they given to eat? 12 Years a Slave is full of such illuminating details. You see Solomon's nightly dinner — a few scraps of meat and four berries on a plate. You see how the slaves sleep crammed and cold. You see what a flogging looked like. You see the human reality of the national crime.

It was exactly that human reality that was missing from the American-made films of 2012, that sense of the physical intimacy of slavery. Lincoln was a movie about laws, Django Unchained a fantasy of revenge. Clearly, for American directors, the story of slavery demands a kind of escape; the crime is still too painful and troubling to be looked at in the face, which is exactly what 12 Years a Slave does. The end of Solomon Northup's journey isn't a glamorous departure after having destroyed the master's house, nor is it a glowing sense of gratitude that the law has finally worked itself out. Northup returns to his family, broken, to find he's missed the arrival of many of life's great beauties. His story seems to demand some vast redemption but history doesn't provide it. In real life the kidnapped man is just wounded and healing.